As fuel prices increase, customers become more demanding, and the overall costs of operations rise. This means it’s more important than ever to improve your business fleet management. Good fleet management cannot only increase your fleet safety but can also highlight both vehicle and driver-related issues that could be affecting your bottom line. Here we’ll take a look at five ways to improve your business fleet management.
Take Steps to Reduce Fuel Costs
We’ve all seen massive increases in the cost of fuel in recent months and when you consider that fuel can account for up to 60% of your overall operating costs, reducing those costs is a number one issue for many businesses. A good fleet management system with GPS tracking will allow you to monitor a vehicle’s usage and identify how driver performance is affecting fuel consumption. You can then use the data to address any issues that are increasing fuel consumption, such as driving aggressively or idling. Plus, by reducing the amount of fuel you use, you’ll be helping the environment too.
Become More Proactive with Maintenance
Staying on top of routine maintenance can help to improve the efficiency of your fleet by ensuring that all the vehicles and equipment you need are serviceable and ready for use. By taking a preventative rather than reactive approach, you can extend the usable lives and productive hours of your vehicles. Once again, a good fleet management system will give you the data you need to assess when preventative servicing and maintenance are due.
Automate Workflows
When job seekers peruse careers rooted in happiness, they are looking for companies that innovate and move with the times. If you want to get ahead of the game, you need to ditch old-fashioned paper systems. Switching to a digitized workflow will help improve time management and optimize the performance of your fleet by significantly reducing human error and miscommunication. With a good system in place, you can automate tasks such as routing and scheduling deliveries, assigning jobs to drivers and invoicing and billing. Plus, it can help you to become more proactive about vehicle and equipment maintenance.
Optimize Routes
Whether your fleet is delivering to businesses or consumers, getting the goods there quickly and on time is imperative. This means finding the optimum route. An advanced fleet management system will give you real-time visibility on vehicle location and the route it’s following while giving drivers up-to-date information on traffic delays and bottlenecks to ensure they’re always following the most efficient route.
Ensure Safer Operations
Erratic or aggressive driving doesn’t just put your drivers at risk, but it can damage your fleet. A fleet management system with in-vehicle sensors can help you to track speed, driving styles, unscheduled stops and idling while installing a vehicle camera system will encourage safer driving behaviors. Better driving can help to increase driver safety, reduce accidents and can potentially lower insurance and other costs for commercial fleets. The best vehicle camera systems include features such as HD video, night vision and real-time distracted driving retention.